We don’t care about prisoners in NZ. It takes too much thinking to really appreciate how broken our society is and we are not a nation who likes thinkers. Our negative egalitarianism mixed with garden variety bigotry towards Maori and Pacific Islanders gets whipped up be a crime ratings driven myopic media who sensationalise crimes despite the crime rate dropping over the last 20 years.

This media attention gets people angry and that anger gets manipulated by politicians and lynch mobs like the Sensible Sentencing for their own ends. Private prisons are just the latest mutation when hate becomes social policy.

No politician ever got punished at the polls for screaming ‘lock em up and throw away the key’.

Jimmy Akuhata. Kid from Whangarei… Protected at Ngawha without a problem. Sent to SERCO… Dropped head first off the landing. One tiny incident report stating nothing. His trial, and justice, held up by two years and almost didn’t happen as his brain damage took that long to heal for him to be fit to stand trial.

If you judge a society on how they treat their worst, we are a callous, easily led population manipulated by our anger via a media more interested in ratings heat than shedding light.

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Over the past seven years, since NatzKEY became government, NZ has lost it’s decent, fair and respectful social structure. This has been replaced by something closely resembling cruel ferocious savagery, where those at the bottom of the hierarchical chain are continually victimized, blamed, abused and now it seems, eventually die as a result of status, or are killed!

I have always wondered why rogue politicians and business people (“prominent NZer” being only one of many, who have abused their positions of power), seem to avoid serving their debt to society, by going to prison! After the past week’s horrendous revelations, I think I know why.

Obviously they are able to afford to buy their way out of serving time as a means of protecting themselves, whereas the ordinary vulnerable Kiwi man or woman who falls foul of the law, gets banged up through the inability to bribe authorities/politicians and God knows who else to stay on the outside!

Indeed we have become a very insensitive, unfair, unequal society! Nothing to be proud of!

National uses the typical right wing approach of lying by omission. They use false statistics by leaving out or deliberately not collecting data that would show the true extent of violence in public and private prisons.

Serco being rated as “exceptional” is an example of omitting relevant data and manipulating information to get a desired outcome and to hide the dysfunction and brutality in Mt Eden Prison.

Providing false data is a strategy to back up the right’s failed theory that privatisation provides the best service delivery for prisons and other organasitions that were traditionally run by the State.

If National and other right wing parties and their supporters really believed that privatisation was effective, they would be open and transparent in the provision of data. The fact that they falsify performance results shows they know that privatisation of public services doesn’t work. The main motivations for privatisation are cost cutting and making profits, which negatively impact on the people for whom the services are provided.

We are taught to think of prisonerss as dangerous and ruthless, and no doubt many are, but while in prison they are also utterly at the mercy of the the prison system, ultimately the state, for every aspect of their lives and life itself, and that must include protecting them from other prisoners. That does make imprisonment very costly, and for that reason alone it ought to be a last resort, for the worst kinds of criminals.

There used to be a saying, ” People are put in prison as punishment, not for punishment.” That seems to have gone by the board.